Session Abstract

The burgeoning of panels on teaching at the Annual Meeting and the focus on teaching made by Kenneth Pomeranz in his recent Presidential Address suggest that historians need to ask when and how teaching became central to the American Historical Association. Prior to 1920 many teachers were members, and the Association’s leaders led a series of commissions working for the advancement of teaching history on a higher intellectual plane. Yet Robert Townsend’s history of the organization from 1880 to 1940 demonstrates that by the early 1930s research had replaced teaching almost completely in the Association, and that a national survey of curricula was seen as a distinct failure. This panel will show how from the early 1960s a movement arose among historians that approached history education on a new plane. Its leaders called for teachers and professors to work together on the local as well as the national level, developing projects to stimulate more adventurous teaching in both schools and colleges.

Teaching with primary sources through open-ended discussion became the focal-point of such efforts. During the 1960s arose the Amherst Project, a series of seventy pamphlets of primary sources for U.S. History, and a consortium called the History Education Project (HEP) that brought together leaders of local collaboratives. The quarterly journal called The History Teacher, begun at Notre Dame University in 1967, was brought to Long Beach State University by Eugene L. Asher, becoming an affiliate of the Association. In 1974 leaders of the movement helped the Association found the Divisions of Research, Teaching, and Professional matters, and articles on teaching began appearing in Perspectives. During the early 1980s a new set of leaders—many of them women—brought teaching more fully to the center of the Association’s life. Continuing activity in local programs, fostered by the AHA-OAH Teaching Alliance, interacted with leadership of the Association, culminating in the reaffirmation of teaching made by Arthur S. Link in his Presidential Address in 1984.

This session will gather together key leaders in the reemergence of teaching within the Association to discuss where we have been and where we are heading in a vital area of history work. William Weber, then on the editorial board of The History Teacher, has been doing research on the movement in recent years. Matthew Downey began developing programs with the schools in conjunction with the HEP and social studies organizations while teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Judith P. Zinsser, a teacher at the United Nations International School in New York City, developed panels for the Annual Meeting and assisted the AHA-OAH Teaching Alliance. Marjorie Wall Bingham was a member of the Teaching Division and published curricula while teaching at St. Louis Park High School near Minneapolis. Stanley Katz participated in teaching innovations at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and at Princeton University he aided AHA President Arthur Link in developing programs on teaching. The Chair, Mills Kelly, is a leader in recent efforts to rethink history education, publishing Teaching History in the Digital Age (2013).